[brlewis]

It's possible that most commenters here are right, that the writer just has inferior reasoning capabilities compared to us, and that there's no way any of us could possibly fall for such a scam.

But I think it's more likely that there are techniques scammers can use to incrementally build trust, and that the rest of us would be wise to watch out for such techniques being used against us.

Quote: If it was a scam, I couldn’t see the angle. It had occurred to me that the whole story might be made up or an elaborate mistake. But no one had asked me for money or told me to buy crypto; they’d only encouraged me not to share my banking information. They hadn’t asked for my personal details; they already knew them. I hadn’t been told to click on anything.

The writer had carried on entire conversations with Krista and Calvin which lacked a scam angle. This wore the writer down to where she was more receptive to the stories being told to her. This is a warning to the rest of us to keep our guard up even after such conversations.

When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed. “If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.”

[fatnoah]

> The writer had carried on entire conversations with Krista and Calvin which lacked a scam angle.

>"How much money do you have in your bank account?"

These scammers were good and had finesse, and the incremental approach is 100% effective. This one also plays on the "know your customer" horror stories that people have likely heard about accounts being frozen.

One has to stop every now and then to find the big picture and ask questions like why money in a bank account has to come into play, or to note that getting more detailed and in-depth are often signs of spinning a tale vs. telling the truth. That's also hard to do when you're probably in panic mode.

The callback from the spoofed phone number is very good, but also revealing. The fact that they called the victim and not vice versa, or that the call came from the main number are all clues that something is amiss.

> “It’s a government number,” he said, almost indignant. “It cannot be spoofed.”

This is something that should be taught. I only know how easy this is because I worked on messaging/telephony apps and an occasional misconfiguration while testing resulted in me sending texts or initiating calls that appeared to be from a completely different number than the one I was trying to use.

[nasmorn]

If someone calls me and I don’t understand immediately how this relates to something I recently initiated, I just tell them to fuck off. Much to my chagrin this once happened with a delivery driver who was trying to deliver a gift to a friends address. After I remembered I had some apologizing to do when he called again just trying to do his job. Unfortunately saying “I am from Amazon” in an Indian accent gets you sent right to the top of the fuck off list.

[NotSammyHagar]

You have the right take. That was a scary read, because I could see how that manipulation was so powerful. There was a recent article in the WaPo about this happening to someone who had been a govt scientist. It's very tempting to say I'm financially literate, I'd never do this. But there are lots of scams, one could hit you one day.

The one thing I thought about in this article was that the bank is supposed to ask you those safety questions: why are you doing this, are you in trouble, this might be a scam, what will the money be used for. That might have pulled her out of this mistake. In the WaPo scenario the bank asked the victim those questions and she was told to lie and she did lie to them and lost even more money than this person.

[razakel]

These people are professional criminals. They have manipulation down to a science.